Not a Creature Was Stirring

The preview screening of the studio’s new comic blockbuster, calculated to jump-start buzz among Manhattan’s movers and shakers, evoked the kind of silence one associates with outer space. When the credits rolled, heralding the evaporation of a hundred and eighty million smackeroos, the audience rose and shuffled toward the exits like the brethren en route to their factory in Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis.” While the assorted opinion-makers regained consciousness in the cold air of Broadway, I found myself vis-à-vis none other than Nestor Grossnose, a porky nudnik I knew from our years frequenting the great wheat-germ dispensaries of Sunset Boulevard. Grossnose was a Hollywood producer who had mastered the knack of creating insolvency from the most promising projects. Less vigilant fressers in our golden years, we now repaired to the Carnegie Deli to deconstruct some pickled meat and eviscerate what we’d just seen.

“It’s all schlock,” the impresario railed. “Chazerai for pubescent sub-mentals.” Producing a clipping from his pants pocket, he said, “Lamp this. I culled it from a little magazine called The Week. Is this or is this not our open sesame to Fort Knox?” The kernel of the Grossnose squib centered on Upper Darby, Pennsylvania, where it seemed that a pizzeria owner was charged by police with planting mice in rival pizza shops. “We never had anything like this,” the Police Superintendent said, “where mice have been used as an instrument of crime.”

Grossnose looked for my reaction to the tabloid snippet, smiling like a man with aces back to back.

“The minute I eyeballed this I started working on my acceptance speech,” he said, knocking back his Dr. Brown’s.

“What are you saying?” I asked, realizing that his latest film, “Holiday for Cretins,” had garnered just two Oscar nods, and not from the Academy but from inmates at Bellevue.

Nothing short of mace could have prevented him from pitching his new scenario, which I succumbed to while vaguely discerning the Hindenburg floating into view.

“We fade up on Scotland Yard,” he began. “Inspector Miles Dabney, a rum old veteran with a dry wit who’s seen it all, is reaming out his pipe and thinking of the weekend and that trout that always seems to resist his Royal Coachman. Dabney’s reputation precedes him, and he’s credited with single-handedly solving the Ripper murders.”

“Why not?” Grossnose said. “The little rodents caused the traditional panic that mice do, and while the women are squealing and jumping on chairs they use their teeth and paws to relieve the tellers of two million pounds.”

“Listen, Nestor,” I said, but he cut me off.

“Now, get what Inspector Dabney says. ‘Why, Gammage, this jibes perfectly with Muncefoot’s story of the gang of mice that broke into the Tate and pinched the priceless Constable.’

“ ‘I hadn’t heard of that one,’ Gammage replies. ‘Surely they can’t be the same mice?’

“ ‘Their descriptions matched,’ says Dabney. ‘Tiny white creatures, pink eyes, little tails. Seems a band of them entered the museum, climbed up the wall, and, deftly removing the bucolic masterpiece, transported it on their collective backs out the front door without so much as a by-your-leave. My guess? The lolly’s highlighting some potentate’s billiard room even as we munch our spotted dick.’ ”

“Aha!” Grossnose cried. “What I gave you was just the teaser. Musical sting, cut to flashback. A laboratory somewhere in Blackpool. Here a group of dedicated scientists are performing cutting-edge experiments on mice in an effort to come up with a cure for baldness.”

“Baldness?” I fifed.

“In mice. It’s a big problem in the rodent world—it just doesn’t get written about much. The lead scientist is Chauncey Entwhistle, a handsome devil—and here I may cast Brad Pitt, who loves the role and has promised to make himself available the minute I bring peace to the Middle East. Entwhistle’s co-worker, by the way, is a hot blond biologist named April Foxglove—kind of an Eve Curie but with a great rack. She wears a tight white lab coat, and when a mouse gets loose she screams and hikes up her smock, revealing two long, tanned legs and the black bikini underwear she got as a gift from her peers for making the Nobel short list.

“Later that night,” Grossnose bore on, “Wiggins, the old Cockney janitor, making his rounds and tipsy from his pint of bitter, accidentally bumps a button marked ‘Danger: Radiation!’ ”

“Which is aimed at the mice,” I chimed in, ahead of the drift.

“Precisely,” Grossnose enthused. “But get this: not all the mice get nuked; just the mean, frustrated ones—the ones that have been run through mazes over and over without ever finding their way to the tasty Gouda. It’s these embittered creatures that absorb the juiced-up isotopes and become super-intelligent, albeit sociopathic.”

“I get a cold chill when you say that,” I said, trying to play along while wondering if in the bathroom there might be an open window leading to the street.

“We get the first clue as to their sinister leanings when they pick up a broom, grab Tabby the lovable laboratory cat, and, using the handle as a bat, fungo her out the window. Oh, I forgot to mention, the radiation gives each malevolent mouse the strength of fifty. Suddenly the city of London is hit with a crime wave. Assaults, burglaries, Ponzi schemes, the kidnapping of a hedge-fund executive and his family, who are held for ransom.”

“And all by small white creatures with pink eyes and little tails,” I said.

“Exactly,” he concurred.

“I think you’re really onto something big here, but if you’ll excuse me now I’m due at a barn-raising with some Amish friends.”

“The problem is I don’t have a finish,” Grossnose said imploringly. “That’s where you come in. You’re a scribe. Come up with something and I’ll take good care of you. Of course, there’s no front money, but I’ll see that you get a nice taste of the back end. Let’s say a tenth of a percentage point after quadruple breakeven.”

“You got a deal, Nestor,” I said, pushing back my chair. “But I don’t want a credit. After all, it’s really you who’s cracked the spine of the piece. And, as for my end of the swag, keep it. Between my translating Cavafy and selling seeds, I’m comfortable.”

“I knew you wouldn’t fail me,” he bleated. “What’s the payoff?”

“In the last reel,” I spitballed, “Entwhistle, realizing that the mice possess superior intelligence, uses moral persuasion. He rounds them up and reads them Kierkegaard. Soon each mouse makes his own individual leap of faith and chooses God. In short, they go from laboratory mice to church mice.”

“Are you nuts?” Grossnose wailed in disappointment. “It’s too intellectual. You and I know Kierkegaard, but you think the masses heard of some Greek who poisoned himself?”

“O.K.,” I said. “Try this. Entwhistle teaches them to ice-skate. They become highly skilled at it and they tour America with a show called ‘MiceCapades.’ For a finale, I see a long chorus line of skating rodents banging mini-tambourines and singing ‘Waiting for the Robert E. Lee.’ ”

I don’t know if Grossnose bought my afflatus, but he did ask me, if we changed the story from mice to midgets, maybe we could use bigger tambourines. As it turned out, the bathroom did have an open window, and after I dropped to Seventh Avenue it was home, two Ambien, and beddy-bye. But not before putting fresh cheese in all the traps. ♦